Manhattan has two genetically distinguishable groups of rats: the uptown rats and the downtown rats, separated by the geographic barrier that is midtown.

“If you gave us a rat, we could tell whether it came from the West Village or the East Village,” says Combs. “They’re actually unique little rat neighbors.” And the boundaries of rat neighborhoods can fit surprisingly well with human ones.

CoinTent is a subscription that lets you remove ads across the entire web while still supporting sites you love. CoinTent removes ads on every site you go to, and distributes the money from your subscription to the sites you visit based on the time you spend with them.

Finally! I've been saying this is how ad blockers should work for years.

In fact, most attendees needed little introduction to Gopher — the software had been out for months. It was the developers they were curious about, the Minnesotans who had created the first popular means of accessing the internet. “People we’d never met were telling us how they were using our stuff and adding things to it,” McCahill says. “We had no idea how big Gopher was going to be until we experienced this firsthand and realized that growth could be exponential for a while.”

In the years that followed, the future seemed obvious. The number of Gopher users expanded at orders of magnitude more than the World Wide Web. Gopher developers held gatherings around the country, called GopherCons, and issued a Gopher T-shirt — worn by MTV veejay Adam Curry when he announced the network’s Gopher site. The White House revealed its Gopher site on Good Morning America. In the race to rule the internet, one observer noted, “Gopher seems to have won out.”

When Pee-wee’s Big Holiday debuts on Netflix tomorrow, it will not only mark the feature-length return of Paul Reubens' bowtie-wearing imp, it will also cement one of the most unlikely pop-culture comebacks of all time.

For now, you can send your annoying telemarketers to my friendly and agreeable robot. It will happily chat with them for several minutes. Then take a moment to recognize the potential of this. If you had a Jolly Roger Telephone bot answering your phone, the autodialers will always think it’s a real person and cut through to an agent. Who cares if they figure it out in just a few minutes? Although typically it’s a lot longer – see my YouTube channel for samples. The point is the autodialers will cut through to an agent every time they hit one of these bots. That will break their business model. It will cut their outbound capacity dramatically.